I have spoken with people who seem really smart about how to hire, and also the opposite. Names have been changed…

…but first: an updated on my Apple Care.

My PowerBook, AirPort, and iPod are working fine. Gloria’s iBook and iPod mini are fine, too. So are our iSights. We have spent thousands on Apple hardware and hundreds on software. We are loyal customers. Why does Apple want to alienate us?

I’ve been running the “Prime Number Shitting Bear” at work.

	http://members.surfeu.fi/kklaine/primebear.html

Last week, I got TT2, CGI::Application, Class::DBI, and Number::Tolerant all engaging in wonderful harmony. It turned out, by the way, that I didn’t need any kind of magic trigger to catch strings and convert them before they hit the database. It’s more like this: my class has some fields that are inflated into tolerance objects. I can assign tolerances to them, and their stringification is stored to the database. When Class::DBI finds that stringification, it knows how to turn it back into an object. The beauty is that I can just assign a stringification directly. When I access it, I get the “inflated” version back. I had thought I needed to inflate it before assigning, but I was wrong. All I needed to to, to preserve my sanity, was to put a constraint on the column that only tolerances, valid strings, and undef were allowed to be set.

I’ve gotta say: it was a good day!

Andy and Bill suggested a few books in their “getting a great job” talk, and I picked up two of them last week: “The Brand You 50” and “Ask the Headhunter.” They’re full of good advice, but I wouldn’t really suggest either of them, especially if you can get your hands on the slides from the talk or, better, can witness the talk itself. It condenses all of the useful information in the books (and more) into one sitting.

I admit it. I have licked my PowerBook.

I’m a real newbie to Class::DBI. I’ve known about it for quite a while, but I never used it until OSCON, when I attended Casey’s crash course. I got a nice crash course once I got home, too, when I had to figure out how to make Class::DBI work with MSSQL and ODBC. Some of the problems I had were self-inflicted, like when I didn’t realize I had to include default options (like DBIx::ContextualFetch) if I subclassed db_Main. A few others were caused by ActiveState’s apparently broken Class-DBI ppd, which claimed to be 0.96 but was really 0.95. I did find a nice little bug in Class::DBI itself, though, which apparently only mattered with ODBC+MSSQL. I’m hoping to see my name in the changelog for 0.97; I’ll settle for seeing 0.97 at all, though. I’m trying to avoid needing custom versions of CPAN modules at work.

So, I really like Module::Starter. There are a number of little things in it that bug me, but mostly they only bug me because of the way they’re coded or because of the way I want to extend them. In other words, they’re things that wouldn’t bother users (I think).